NRSC apologizes for 'Obama Girl' tweet

The National Republican Senatorial Committee came under fire Tuesday for tweeting a photo that superimposed Kentucky Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes’s head on the body of “Obama Girl,” the model who starred in a series of 2007 music videos about her crush on President Obama.

“Is Alison Grimes The New ‘Obama Girl’?” the tweet asked, linking to a post on the Kentucky political blog, Bluegrass Bulletin, that featured the photo. It was in reference to Grimes’s New York trip on Monday, where she attended a Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee fundraiser with First Lady Michelle Obama. Iris Wilbur, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s campaign political director, retweeted the NRSC’s tweet from her own account.

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Obama girl: My crush is over

The tweet remained up for a few hours but has since been taken down, as has the photo on Bluegrass Bulletin. NRSC spokeswoman Brook Hougesen called the tweet a mistake.

“We agree, it’s extremely offensive. It was a mistake made by a junior staffer and disciplinary action has been taken,” she said. “We took corrective action as soon as it was brought to our attention and have taken steps to ensure it will never happen again.”

The photo “was intended to be a humorous punctuation mark to ALG being an intended beneficiary of Michele [sic] Obama’s fundraising at a Washington DSCC event,” wrote the Bluegrass Bulletin author in an update to the post in question. “I have removed it from this post voluntarily.”

Grimes said in a statement that the NRSC’s tweet showed the Republican Party’s and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s outdated views on women.

“The NRSC should stand for Notoriously Repeating Sexist Comments – they cannot relate or connect with the women of Kentucky or our country. The incredibly inappropriate comments from Senator McConnell’s team mark a developing pattern and demonstrate just how out of touch McConnell is with the women of Kentucky,” she said. “As I have said, I am proud to wear a dress, and as Kentucky’s more than two million women know, it is not what is in the dress that matters. It is what is in the head and I will stack my head up against Senator McConnell’s any day.”

In a news release later in the day, Grimes’s campaign went further, characterizing the incident as a “sexual attack” and a “sexualized attack.”

McConnell spokeswoman Allison Moore said Democrats’ focus on the NRSC tweet prove that Grimes is “desperate to distract from the real news.”

“It is really pathetic that the Grimes campaign is more worried about what some intern in the basement of the NRSC is tweeting rather than talking about the real issues facing Kentucky, but I am sure we will see this call from their playbook time and time again,” Moore said.

The Obama Girl tweet wasn’t the first time the NRSC has gotten in hot water for raising the gender issue with Grimes. In September, NRSC Communications Director Brad Dayspring called Grimes an “empty dress,” saying she “babbles incoherently and stares blankly into the camera as though she’s a freshman in high school struggling to remember the CliffsNotes after forgetting to read her homework assignment.”